Ten Commandments

In the classroom at Leamy’s National School, the Ten Commandments are not merely a list of religious precepts: they belong to a demanding program of memorization enforced through physical punishment and bound to the boys’ preparation for the sacraments. Their place in that program reveals how Catholic instruction, national identity, and strict control of conduct converge in the children’s schooling.

Place in the catechetical curriculum

As the boys prepare for First Confession and First Communion, their master requires them to learn the catechism, distinguish right from wrong, and be ready to die for the Faith. The Ten Commandments form one item in a much larger body of knowledge: alongside them, pupils must learn the Seven Virtues, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Deadly Sins, and a series of prayers, including the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and the Apostles’ Creed. The lessons make religious learning both a test of memory and a preparation for moral discipline.

The expectation extends beyond learning the material in English. The class must recite its prayers in Irish as well, and forgetting an Irish word or substituting English can provoke the master’s anger and a blow from his stick. He imagines Latin as the language most closely associated with the saints and martyrs, while casting Irish as the language of patriots and English as that of traitors and informers. The commandments therefore sit within a curriculum where religious knowledge is inseparable from the teacher’s coercive methods and his nationalist distinctions between languages.

Memorization and discipline

The master’s demands make the commandments part of a relentless exercise in exact recall: the boys must know the catechism “backwards, forwards and sideways.” He describes the class as the worst he has ever had for First Communion, but insists that he will make Catholics of them through punishment and instruction. The rule is presented not as an invitation to discussion but as knowledge that must be absorbed and repeated correctly.

The lesson’s pressure is reinforced by the boys’ understanding of what lies ahead. First Communion requires learning the questions and answers in a green-covered catechism, which costs threepence; the older pupils study a thicker, red-covered Confirmation catechism costing sixpence. Frank longs to be old enough to carry the red book, yet doubts that he will live long enough, given the adults’ repeated insistence that children should die for Ireland or the Faith. The memorized commandments thus belong to a childhood shaped by both religious expectation and the strikingly uncertain prospect of survival.

The Sixth Commandment and poverty

A classroom exchange gives the commandments a particular moral emphasis. Asked to state the Sixth Commandment, Paddy Clohessy answers that adultery is forbidden; asked what adultery means, he gives the lesson’s definition in terms of impure thoughts, words, and deeds. The master praises him for knowing this commandment, adding that it will keep him pure.

That praise sits beside the conditions of Paddy’s life. He is a poor child whose clothes are shared with his siblings, whose mother shaves his head to control lice, and who often arrives at school visibly marked by hardship. The passage juxtaposes a strong emphasis on sexual purity with the material deprivation surrounding the child whom the master commends. The commandment is taught as a safeguard of moral conduct, but the classroom’s moral vocabulary offers no comparable remedy for the poverty on display.

Religious instruction and the child’s perspective

The boys hear that dying for the Faith is glorious, while Frank’s father praises dying for Ireland. Frank wonders whether anyone wants children to live, especially when his siblings have died young. His mother attributes the deaths to disease and starvation, and to his father’s inability to find work; his father leaves rather than continue the exchange. Against this family experience, the school’s language of martyrdom sounds less like an abstraction than another adult demand laid upon children.

The commandments’ significance in these scenes comes from the way they are taught and surrounded: as compulsory knowledge, under threat of punishment, in a school that joins Catholic formation to nationalist rhetoric. Their classroom authority is clear, but the narrative also shows the distance between that formal moral order and the everyday realities of illness, hunger, bereavement, and fear.